Web 2.0 is at the center of a wave of excitement concerning how
enterprises—commercial or public organisations—are trying to exploit
the current generation of Internet technologies. This four-part article
series
examines aspects of Web 2.0 relevant to the enterprise. In this first installment,
take a look at the business and technical drivers behind Web 2.0, the challenges and
opportunities Web 2.0 presents to enterprises, and the relationship between Web 2.0
and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Rick Robinson is an IT architect in IBM's Emerging Technologies team where he works with customers and with IBM's product development teams to help them understand and exploit the evolving business and technological impact of Web 2.0. Prior to this appointment, Rick led the SOA and BPM Architecture Practise for IBM Software Services in Europe. Rick is recognised worldwide in IBM as an expert in SOA and Web 2.0, and his work has involved technology strategy, business development, solution architecture, organisational change, engagement management, and technical sales.

Introduction

Web 2.0 represents a new wave in business innovation, exploiting the ongoing
maturation of the Internet as a new medium for communication and commerce. Whilst
Web 2.0 isn't a new trend, having existed since at least 2003 (see "How to Succeed
in 2007" in the Resources section), its adoption by
business is at a relatively early stage, and its overall significance is still
hotly contested.

This four-part
series
focuses on what has become known as Enterprise 2.0—the relevance
and exploitation of Web 2.0 ideas and technologies by commercial and public-sector
organisations (see "The state of Enterprise 2.0" and "The 10 top challenges facing
enterprise mashups" in Resources for more background on
Enterprise 2.0):

Part 1 examines the business and technical drivers behind Web 2.0, the challenges and
opportunities Web 2.0 presents to enterprises, and the relationship between Web 2.0 and SOA.

Part 2 covers the major solution types emerging through which
enterprises can exploit Web 2.0.

Part 3 presents a collection of industry and business scenarios in
which those solutions can be deployed, and explains the value that can be
realised by doing so.

Part 4 is a more technical article focusing on the options for exposing
the content and functions of core information and transaction systems such as
IBM® CICS®, IBM Information Management System (IMS)™ and IBM
DB2® in Web 2.0 solutions.

Two general interpretations of what Web 2.0 means are widely accepted, both
attributed to Tim O'Reilly. The more detailed of these interpretations analyses
Web 2.0 into a set of patterns through which technology is currently being used to
create and support business models using Internet technologies (see "What is Web
2.0?" in Resources). The more general second
interpretation provides a useful insight into the real nature of Web 2.0. Put
simply, following the dot-com bust, we're seeing renewed interest in the use of
maturing Internet technologies to create new ways to communicate and do business.

A tipping point

The current interest in Web 2.0 has arisen because of a culmination of economic
and technology trends. Taken together, these trends make the social and technical
characteristics of the current generation of Internet technologies a fertile
source of business innovation. The trends include:

An increasing focus throughout organizations, and not just at a leadership
level, on innovative ways to improve performance as it becomes
increasingly hard to achieve improvements in organizational performance through
cost control or mergers and acquisitions (see the IBM CEO Innovation Survey in
Resources).

The continuous global explosion of reach and participation in
collaborative, pervasive, richly featured communication technologies. Over
1 billion people are now online, nearly 300 million through a broadband
connection (see the Internet World statistics link in
Resources). Studies show that a striking number of them
contribute content and interact with each other socially and economically in
expanding networks rather than using the web simply to shop or access
information (see the Internet World statistics link and "The Internet's Growing
Role in Life's Major Moments" in Resources).

Generational changes in attitudes to technology and the media of choice for
communication, consumption, and work. The Internet isn't new to younger
generations, who have grown up with it and are comfortable using it for social
interaction, commerce, and work (see "Generations Online" in
Resources).

Increasing capabilities and falling costs for the manufacture of
personalised or customised products. The era of mass production is
evolving into the era of mass personalisation ("Mass Customization: The New
Frontier in Business Competition," B. Joseph Pine II, Harvard Business School
Press; New Ed edition, 1 May 1999). Anything from clothes to devices to
automobiles can be customised or personalised at or about its normal price
point, rather than requiring expensive bespoke design or production at a premium
(see Resources for examples).

A continuous process of business optimisation resulting in transformation
and outsourcing. Ongoing competition in the global marketplace through
successive economic cycles has forced organisations to focus continuously on
business optimisation. This includes the integration of the computing systems
that support business operations and their increasing exposure within and beyond
the enterprise boundary through SOA.

Web 2.0 technologies

Promoting participation:
blogs, wikis, and social computing

Since the dot-com bust around 2001, our use of Internet technology has matured,
resulting in the evolution of a new communications medium in which people of any
generation and from any culture can participate.

For instance, personal profiles, blogs, and wikis provide simple tools that allow
people to communicate without understanding underlying Web and browser
technologies. Using them, people can share their interests and expertise, and
create collaborative content.

By using social bookmarking, people share their links to content and services,
making it easier for others to find them. By tagging and rating these links, the
content of the Web is categorised and rated according to the interests of
consumers. All of this has resulted in a richer, better-connected Internet in
which individuals can meet and communicate with each other on topics of common
interest more easily than through any previous medium.
IBM Lotus® Connections
and
IBM Lotus Quickr™
provide collaboration software incorporating these features.

Promoting syndication
and reuse: services, feeds, and widgets

Supporting the applications described in the previous section is a set of
technologies that have emerged over the last decade or so. Syndicated news
feeds—simple streams of stories and information formatted in XML
according to the RSS or Atom protocols—are now widespread and enable
aggregator sites to carry a vast array of content and let individuals create their
own aggregations.

Feeds are an example of services created according to RESTful principles,
a set of design and implementation prescriptions that aim to result in the
creation of services that are as scalable and easy to use as the Internet as a
whole (REST stands for Representational State Transfer). Many web sites make their
content and functionality available as RESTful services so that they can be
incorporated into other web applications. At the same time, open standards and SOA
advancements have made many services and information sources available through
robust, secure web services.

Finally, technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) provide more
richly featured, responsive user interfaces in a browser. The
IBM
WebSphere® Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0
and the
IBM WebSphere MQ Bridge for HTTP
both provide features to enable the creation of REST services, feeds, and Ajax
user interfaces. The Project Zero community development project (see
Resources for a link) is also exploring the capabilities
of a lightweight application environment to deliver Web 2.0 solutions using an
approach based on scripting languages.

Promoting agility:
situational applications and mashups

Mashup applications put great application construction power in the hands of end
users to combine function and content from many sources into new applications at
low costs. Frequently, such applications mix operational data with news and
events, financial information, or weather. People use mashups to combine external
services and information with their own data, such as their holiday plans or the
customer with whom they're dealing, in an application that brings together all the
information and function they need in one place.

Social computing allows people to share mashups—or the individual feeds
and widgets from which they're constructed—with others, bringing this
power quickly to the hands of large audiences.

Web 2.0 releases the
value of SOA

From their earliest days, web services and SOA concepts have promised a new world
of composite applications, simply wired together from existing services presented
through the Internet. The progress made in applying these technologies and
architectures since their inceptions is now bearing fruit with the emergence of
Web 2.0.

Whilst not always considered part of the mainstream SOA movement, RESTful
services and feeds based on protocols like RSS and Atom have always served as good
examples of well-defined SOA services outside the world of web services. Their
widespread availability, in addition to web services, makes syndication and
situational applications possible. So whilst Web 2.0 is a broad theme, it very
much includes the concept of composite applications created by combining services,
feeds, and widgets enabled through SOA. Correspondingly, the concepts and patterns
of Web 2.0 can be used to unlock new value by organisations that have invested in
SOA. Part 2 of this series shows examples of this exploitation.

A new world for
business

The culmination of technology and business trends drive a number of consequences:

The distribution of all forms of content that can be digitised is undergoing
revolutionary change.
The cost of distributing content to a
potentially vast global audience has collapsed as content—for example, the
written word, film and video, music, numerical data, and pictures—is
digitised. As a result, the number of providers of digital content is exploding,
and the proportion of content that's accessed through regular push
channels—print and broadcast, for example—is falling rapidly as
consumers access exactly what they want, when they want it, online.

The influence on consumers of traditional approaches to marketing, advertising,
and branding is falling.
At the same time that mass-audience broadcasts are
becoming less effective for advertisers, individuals across the globe are
increasingly able to share their interests or concerns, to benefit from the
experiences of their peers, or to access expert knowledge. Consumer-created reviews
and content are now influential on spending patterns and compete for attention with
marketing through traditional channels.

Traditional businesses are targeting The
Long Tail niche markets for growth and finding themselves in competition with
niche providers.
As the cost of customising, personalising, distributing, and
accessing products, content, and services falls, it's becoming possible to penetrate
niche markets that previously couldn't be serviced, were the exclusive domain of
niche providers, or didn't exist. The exploitation of these markets is described by
the idea of The Long Tail economics, as they represent the vast number of markets
that consist of small numbers of customers, perhaps distributed geographically
around the world. They are uneconomic to serve through traditional business models,
but can be made accessible through the low-cost models enabled by Web 2.0
technologies. Their importance is increased by the saturation of traditional markets
that has occurred in recent years through the sustained focus on business
optimisation in them. At the extreme of this scale is the phenomenon of peer-to-peer
economic activity, where through the use of Internet-enabled brokers and mediators,
individuals can leverage the communications, transactional, assurance, and
distribution capabilities that have traditionally been the preserve of large
corporations, to do business with each other directly.

New end-user applications
need to be delivered more rapidly than ever before, either to increase
organisational agility or to deliver new products and services to market.
In
some sectors, the commercially competitive life of products has reduced to the point
where it's shorter than the average application deployment life cycle. So unless
application delivery can be speeded up beyond traditional limits, markets become
commoditised before they can be reached. In other sectors, the need to rapidly
respond to new situations or competitive threats means that business analysts,
competitive experts, or operational decision makers need a new type of rapidly
assembled data- or content-driven application to enable them to respond. For these,
and other reasons, organisations are exploring the deployment and use of situational
applications and enterprise mashups—effectively, The Long Tail of business
solutions.

Summary

Web 2.0 is a mix of new approaches to
interacting with customers, new Internet-centric business opportunities, and
supporting technologies that let individuals connect and interact with each other
more easily. In one sense it represents the emergence of new possibilities enabled
by the widespread adoption of SOA principles and technologies. Web 2.0 offers
business opportunities, but brings challenges in how corporations embrace
community, approach the sharing and protection of proprietary information, and
identify and exploit The Long Tails in their marketplace. Subsequent articles in
this
series
explore the opportunities, challenges, patterns, and technologies of Web 2.0 in
more detail.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Matthew Perrins and Stephen Watt for their help in
reviewing and commenting on this article.

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